13 Steps for a Successful CRM Adoption - part 2

This is the second article of our series aiming to highlight the important issues you will encounter during CRM adoption. With our advice, you will be able to implement CRM into your company smoothly. In the first article, we discussed the importance of defining needs, choosing the right type of system and the right vendor as well as considering the budget. Let’s continue with five other points.

5. Customize the systemCustomization is an important option when talking about CRM systems. Each company has different needs and one kind of system can hardly fit them all. Therefore, there is not only a plenty of systems to choose from but also many vendors offering the possibility of customizing their CRM product.

However, customization might be quite expensive and the system can quickly become too complicated for your employees to use properly. Before any making a decisions, consult the provider to be sure about the price and about the impact on the system functionality.

6. Stick to your priorities

With so many CRM options and customizations to choose from, you might get carried away and order plenty of features that you only don’t need, but moreover will make the system complicated to use. Look back at the priorities you listed and focus on them.

Later, if you find out you need some more tools, it is not a problem to add them, but start with smaller steps so your employees can get used to the system.

7. Don’t rush the processWhen you follow our advice, CRM implementation will be pretty smooth and quick, however, you still might feel it takes too long. In any case, you shouldn’t attempt to accelerate the process too much because you have to carefully list all your requirements in order to identify the most important ones.

To speed up the process a bit, you can clean up your database so you will not upload the same data multiple times, and that will save you not only uploading time but also you will not get confused by redundancies afterwards.

8. Training and motivationIt’s important that you train your employees so they know how to operate the new system. Also, every time the CRM system is upgraded, the staff should know about the updated features. Keep in mind that only one training in the initial phase of implementation is not enough and training should be continuous.

One often neglected aspect is to motivate your employees to use CRM. They might perceive it just as another obligation that is only taking their time. It is up to the management to show them that CRM will help them with their routine tasks and that its more of a friend than a foe.

9) Adjust your employee workflowCRM can bring huge advantages to your business but first you must make the necessary changes also within employee workflow. With CRM system, some tasks will become more automatic and some new tasks will take place. Therefore, it is crucial to realize how the workflow will look like and prepare your employees to the changes.

In our third article, we will discuss the final steps of the implementation process. To read the first article of this series, please find it here.

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